Lolita as a Foucauldian Case Study Reading the introduction to Lolita invoked a strong sense of déjà vu, which I realized came from the uncanny similarities between it and “The Custom House”. Both introductions serve to set up the stories as “true” (or in terms of The Scarlet Letter, based on a true story). More […]
The Never-Ending Confession The Scarlet Letter, a novel so imbued with the themes of sin, guilt, and confession, has an interesting confessional: the scaffold. Hester is taken to the scaffold early in the narrative and a confession is demanded of her, but she refuses that with silence. Her silence is in itself a powerful act, […]
“Double Standard of Sexual Morality.” In Cott’s essay, I was particularly intrigued by the Puritan “double standard of sexual morality” (133), in which women, being of the weaker sex, were more prone to succumb to temptation, even though it was not permitted for them to initiate sexual acts. This lead to greater blame for women […]
Obsession for Confession We discussed confessions in class today — at churches, in therapy, and even on Facebook. PostSecret is another form of confession: People send in their secrets on postcards to a specified address, and the founder of PostSecret, Frank Warren, posts select ones online. He has also published several books of postcards secrets.
Michel Foucault, in the discourse relayed in his work The History of Sexuality, or L’Histoire de la Sexualité, the history of power, pleasure, and knowledge as told by referencing specific acts and records generated by a population. To explore, whatever may develop, mostly in the absence; yet only to discover renewed […]
In Part Three of The History of Sexuality, entitled “Scientia Sexualis”, Michel Foucault makes one conclusion about the “truth”: “…There has evolved over several centuries, a knowledge of the subject; a knowledge not so much of his form, but of that which divides him, determines him perhaps, but above all causes him to be ignorant of […]
Discourse on Sex and Sexuality In Part One of The History of Sexuality, Michael Foucault poses the question: “Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same […]
